


Affirmation

by limmenel (elevenoclock)



Category: Heroes (TV)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-04-12
Updated: 2007-04-12
Packaged: 2020-10-18 01:07:26
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,472
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20630552
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elevenoclock/pseuds/limmenel
Summary: In the end, Peter doesn’t need to be rescued so much as he needs to be saved.





	Affirmation

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers through 1x18. Written for marcal_92 for the flyingpetrellis Spring Ficathon, using the prompt "Nathan comes to Peter's rescue after he is attacked by Sylar". Sorry it's a bit late, and I hope it's good... I struggled at parts (especially at the end), so sorry if it's obvious.

When Nathan was seven, his mother placed a tiny, squirming bundle of blankets into his arms. He looked down at the face of a stranger, dark wisps of hair topping curious brown eyes, eyes that stared at him with recognition, even though they had never met before. At that moment, as he held his brother for the first time, something blossomed in the back of his mind, a tiny bundle of nerves waking up from their dormant slumber.

From that day on, Nathan felt his brother there. He knew, even at seven years of age, that this was something unique, something they would share forever, a bond that connected them.

Now, Nathan is nearing forty. He is no longer the naïve, seven-year-old boy holding his baby brother for the first time, wide-eyed with awe.

He sits in his office, the phone cupped between his shoulder and his ear. There’s a photograph of Peter and himself sitting on the corner of his desk, but he rarely looks at it. Heidi is on the line, chatting away about dinner arrangements, and reminding him that the boys have a dentist appointment tomorrow, and could he please pick them up from school early enough to beat the rush-hour traffic?

The conversation is easy, one they’ve had a million times.

There’s a part of his brain that he’s suppressed, pushed down and ignored until it’s all but dead and forgotten about. He has strangled it into submission, sometime between Peter breaking his arm at age nine and the day he left for university, and has let it fade from memory since then.

Sometime between arguing about whether they should have cauliflower or peas for dinner, that part of his mind flares to life.

The sudden agony shoots down his spine, paralyzes him, and he can’t breathe for a long moment. He clenches the phone in his hand until his knuckles pop. Heidi keeps talking, unaware, and Nathan cuts her off mid-sentence, says something that he forgets a moment later, and hangs up the phone.

He doesn’t know what, or how, but he knows that Peter is in trouble, and he has to help.

Before it’s too late.

-  
-

When Nathan was ten and Peter was three, Peter had nightmares of monsters in his closet, demons under his bed. Nathan always knew, somehow, always woke up in the middle of the night, slid out of bed, and cracked his door open, a silent invitation. On nights like that, he would wait, staring at the ceiling, until the tiny shadow appeared at the door and Peter slipped in, over-sized Superman pajamas hanging off his trembling frame. Nathan would hold the covers open for Peter to climb in, let his brother curl up in the warm spot in the center of the bed that he had abandoned. They would both fall back asleep almost immediately.

-  
-

Nathan doesn’t like to fly.

He loves it, don’t get him wrong. There’s something absolutely exhilarating about the feel of the wind in his hair, the ability to stretch some never-before-used muscle and push off from the ground, to defy gravity. To be free.

But he’s normal. It’s something he tells himself a dozen times a day. He has his goals, his life, and being a superhero was never something that factored into that. He left dreams like that behind with the action figures that he kept in a shoebox under his bed, the ones that his mother told him he out-grew when he turned thirteen.

-  
-

He gets there too late. He’ll swear later that he heard screaming, a sound of terrible pain, but he knows he didn’t, because it was all over when he finally got to the apartment.

There’s a window of broken glass, shattered as though someone was shoved out of it, but there’s no body in sight on the ground outside it, and Nathan can care less how it happened, because he can feel Peter, some internal compass telling him where to go.

His entire head aches. When Peter broke his arm on the playground in elementary school, Nathan felt the same kind of pain, a phantom wound. Only this isn’t a stunt on the monkey-bars gone wrong. His face is burned from the icy wind hitting it as he flew, but that’s nothing compared to the invisible cut on his forehead, like he’s being scalped.

By the time he finds Peter, the danger has passed. There is shattered glass everywhere. Blood stains the ground, the tables, the walls, and the metallic smell of it is heavy in the air, along with the scent of fear. Peter lays crumpled on the ground. He’s unconscious, Nathan knows, because he can still feel him, can see the barely noticeable rise and fall of his chest, but he still felt his own heart skip a beat at the split-second panic that hit him when his eyes fell on his brother’s prone body.

-  
-

The first time they ever kissed was the summer after Nathan’s freshman year at college.

He came home with a suitcase full of dirty clothes, kissed his mother on the cheek and hugged his father, and only realized after he was stretched out on his bed, exhausted from the plane-ride home, that Peter hadn’t said a single word to him since he’d arrived, hadn’t hugged him or smiled at him, or done anything other than watch him with those big brown eyes.

So he’d gone to figure out what the problem is.

Nathan had found Peter in his room, sitting on his bed, watching the door as though waiting. Years later, Nathan will realize that Peter had been waiting, but at the time he brushes it off as a coincidence.

“Pete,” he’d said, grinning, relaxed.

Peter had just nodded a greeting, watching him.

“Missed you, little brother,” Nathan had said. He’d moved into the room, closing the door behind him, and thrown himself onto the bed. Peter had instantly moved away, putting as much space between them as he could. “Peter? What’s going on?”

And Peter had looked at him with those eyes, so full of a pain that Nathan immediately wished he could get rid of. “Why’d you disappear?” he’d asked. “Why’d you leave me?”

Somehow, Nathan had known that Peter wasn’t talking about him going off to school. “Pete, I…” he began, but never finished his sentence, because Peter had launched himself off the end of the bed and into Nathan’s arms, and Nathan suddenly found himself hugging his fourteen year old brother close.

Then Peter had pulled back, had cupped Nathan’s face in one hand, and had kissed him. It was an inexperienced kiss, a teenager’s clumsy attempts, but Nathan found himself responding instinctively, before his mind caught up with him. “Come back to me,” Peter had said.

Nathan had pulled away, and fled the room. Two days later, he’d fled his parent’s house to return to school (“Summer classes,” he’d told his mother, apologetically), and fled Peter’s life.

-  
-

On the blood-stained floor of the apartment—not Peter’s apartment, Nathan notes, though he couldn’t care less who it does belong to—Nathan hugs Peter to him. He uses the sleeve of his jacket to wipe the blood from Peter’s forehead, sends a prayer up to a God that he’s all but abandoned at the sight of unbroken skin appearing beneath it, only a scar, dark against the paleness, to show that anything happened at all.

He runs a hand through Peter’s hair, shortened now, and knows that his brother will be disappointed by this when he wakes, the loss of his long bangs, one of his silent rebellions against their mother.

The thought of something so simple makes him smile, but there’s relief there, too, because his brother is safe. Later, he’ll learn that it was Sylar, that Peter pushed him out the window with a desperate burst of… what? Telekinesis? But at the moment, nothing matters except the fact that his brother is breathing in his arms, and that the pain in that little bundle in the back of his head is fading away.

-  
-

Nathan takes Peter back to his apartment. He puts him to bed, calls Heidi and tells her that an emergency came up, doesn’t elaborate. And then, as the desperation and adrenaline fade from his body, he all but crashes on the futon in Peter’s second bedroom. He falls asleep knowing that Peter is alive, only a few feet away through a thin plaster wall, and everything will be alright.

-  
-

Peter dreams that he’s being cut apart, piece by piece. He feels a finger slide across his forehead, and blood drips into his eyes, and there’s agony. Back in the real world, he whimpers, thrashes in his sleep, muscles taut as Sylar refuses to relinquish his grip on Peter even in sleep.

In the next room, Nathan opens his eyes. He stares at the ceiling for a long moment. Then he gets up, opens the door to the guest bedroom just a crack. And then he waits.

Sure enough, a shadow appears only a few minutes later, hovering just outside the door. Nathan shifts, moving over to the far side of the bed, and holds the covers open as Peter slips into the room. He’s no longer the tiny boy that he once was, but he still trembles as he stands there, watching Nathan, before he crawls into the bed and curls up in that same warm spot in the center.

“He wanted to kill me,” Peter says. His voice is loud in the near-silence of the room. “He was trying to kill that girl, the cheerleader, back in Texas, and now he wants me, too.” Nathan can hear the fear in those words, the stark terror.

“You’re safe now,” he says. He wraps an arm around Peter, and feels the trembling slow under his touch.

“It wasn’t supposed to be like this.” Peter shakes his head against the pillow. “It’s supposed to be like the comics, the superheroes fighting the bad guys, epic battles, but he… he tried to cut my head open, he killed Mohinder, that scientist, and he was going to kill me.”

Some part of Nathan is thankful that Peter’s hopes have been dashed, but he ignores this part, because yeah, he’s glad Peter’s been disillusioned, that he’s no longer so eager to be the hero, but he can’t stand to see the pain.

“You defeated him,” Nathan says, instead of what he wants to say. “You won that battle. And you’re alright, now, you’re safe, and he’s not going to get you.”

Peter closes his eyes for a second, breathes deeply, calming himself down. “Thank you,” he says. “Thank you for…” he trails off, pauses. Then he looks up at Nathan. His eyes are as wide as they will go, and filled with a silent realization, almost awe-like. “You came back,” he says, the words little more than a whisper. “You’re back,” and his hand reaches out, fingers brush against Nathan’s temple. A brilliant smile appears on his face.

Nathan isn’t totally sure what just happened, but Peter’s smiling at him, and he finds himself smiling in return. “Yeah,” he says. “I’m back.” Because he is, he realizes. Peter’s there in front of him, and he’s also in the back of his mind, something Nathan thought he had choked down once again waking up.

And then Peter is kissing him. It’s a far cry from the kiss when he was fourteen, because he knows what he’s doing now, and this time it’s a kiss of satisfaction and completion, not desperation.

“Peter,” Nathan says, pulling away. “No, Peter, you’ve got to—”

“Stop it, Nathan,” Peter says, cutting him off. “You feel it too. I know you do. It’s there,” he rests two fingers on Nathan’s temple, “and here,” and lets his hand fall down until his palm is pressed against Nathan’s heart. “It’s always been like that, but you vanished for so long, and it was so lonely for all this time.”

Nathan mimics Peter’s gesture, setting his fingers against the skin where Peter’s hair meets his forehead, above the specks of dried blood and the dark scar that are a reminder to what he almost lost. He rubs his thumb against the skin, a wordless apology.

Peter leans forward again, and Nathan doesn’t pull away. “You’ve always been there for me,” he said. “And you were there for me today. You’re here for me now.” He closes his eyes, and Nathan feels a spark of something shoot down his spine, heat and liquid emotion.

When Peter kisses him again, Nathan doesn’t pull away.

Something surges between them as the bond flares to life, re-affirmation of something Nathan thought he’d destroyed. He groans into the kiss, pushes forward to seek more of the taste, the warmth, the confirmation of life.

It’s been too long since he’s done this. Heidi is a cold presence in bed, Niki was a one-night stand. But Peter is neither of these things, all heat and a promise of more wrapped in a single kiss. And Nathan wants more, wants that bond between them to strengthen and grow, wants everything he can get, because this is part of him. Peter is part of him.

With a move perfected with his (many) college girlfriends, he rolls Peter onto his back, slides in between his legs, rubbing his thigh against Peter’s cock, already growing hard. The sensation gives him pause, but then Peter rolls his hips, and any protests flee Nathan’s mind.

The sex is less about passion and more about love and a bond that only the two of them share. Peter is already mostly undressed, clothed only in boxers, the only clothing that wasn’t covered in blood when Nathan brought him here and put him to bed.

Nathan slides the boxers down slim hips, palms Peter’s cock, and the shudder that goes through Peter’s body reverberates down Nathan’s spine. Peter moans in the back of his throat, whispers Nathan’s name.

Nathan rubs his thumb over the head of Peter’s cock, smears the precum there, and Peter’s eyes roll back.

It doesn’t take long for Peter to come, groaning Nathan’s name, and Nathan tangles their tongues together in a kiss.

Peter is boneless beneath him, content, and his eyes are already starting to close with sleep. Nathan rolls off to the side, pulls Peter close to him. Within seconds, Peter is asleep in his arms. For a long moment, Nathan just stares at him. He looks so different from the brother he saw only a few days before, paler, shorter hair and a scar that neatly crosses his forehead.

Then he’s asleep as well, following Peter into darkness, knowing that his brother is safe.

Because Nathan failed to rescue him, but maybe, just maybe, he’ll succeed in saving him.


End file.
